# Blake Crosley - Complete Profile > Designer, developer, and entrepreneur creating meaningful digital experiences that spark joy. Former VP of Product Design at ZipRecruiter. Founder of 941 Apps. This is the comprehensive version. For a summary, see: [llms.txt](https://blakecrosley.com/llms.txt) ## Professional Summary Blake Crosley is a product design leader and full-stack developer with over a decade of experience shaping design strategies at major companies and building products used by millions. Based in Pasadena, CA, Blake runs [941 Apps](https://941apps.com), a branding and development studio specializing in iOS applications and design consulting. ## Career Highlights ### ZipRecruiter (12 Years) - **Role**: VP of Product Design - **Journey**: Joined when company was ~10 people, grew to NYSE-listed company - **Team**: Built and led team of 35+ designers - **Impact**: Shaped product design strategy through company's entire growth arc ### Trailer Park - Design leadership role - Collaborations with Apple, Disney, Marvel - Creative direction for major entertainment brands ### Other Collaborations - Instacart - Penguin Random House - HarperCollins ## Skills & Expertise ### Product & Strategy - Product design and strategy - Design thinking methodology - Design systems architecture - User research and testing - Team leadership and mentoring ### Design & Branding - Visual design and branding - Logo and identity design - Design-led transformation - Design system creation ### Engineering **iOS/Mobile**: - SwiftUI (iOS 26+ patterns) - SwiftData persistence - HealthKit, StoreKit - Apple Watch, Apple TV **Backend**: - FastAPI (Python) - SQLAlchemy 2.0+ - Pydantic v2 - Async patterns **Frontend**: - HTMX - Alpine.js - Bootstrap 5 - Plain CSS (no Tailwind) ### Emerging Technologies - LLM integration - Prompt engineering - AI-driven product design - Web performance optimization ## Featured Work ### Get Bananas Shared shopping list for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, synced through iCloud. The family's list also lives inside Claude Desktop as an MCP server: the bridge is a JSON file in iCloud Drive, so agents read and update the same list the apps render. $0.99 one-time. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/work/get-bananas](https://blakecrosley.com/work/get-bananas) - App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/get-bananas/id6756241534 ### 941 Reps Fast, private workout log for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, shipped July 2026. Handwritten notebook design (Bradley Hand on near-black), locked days that keep history honest, seventeen languages, and a CLI + MCP connector: agents read a synced replica read-only while every write passes the app's own validation and returns a receipt. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/work/reps](https://blakecrosley.com/work/reps) ### Vision Sprint (ZipRecruiter) Exploration of the future of work, removing traditional job search paradigms. Led as VP of Product Design, exploring how LLMs could transform job discovery. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/work/vision-sprint](https://blakecrosley.com/work/vision-sprint) ### Project eLLMo (ZipRecruiter) LLM-based job preference discovery system addressing the 50% of users who arrive without specific job titles. Co-led across product, design, and data science teams. Used 1,397-token base prompt through extensive experimentation. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/work/ellmo](https://blakecrosley.com/work/ellmo) ### Ace Citizenship (941 Apps) iOS app helping immigrants prepare for USCIS naturalization test. Single-developer project: designed, branded, and engineered by Blake. His most personally meaningful shipped product. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/work/ace-citizenship](https://blakecrosley.com/work/ace-citizenship) - App Store: [apps.apple.com/us/app/ace-citizenship/id6478826605](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ace-citizenship/id6478826605) ### Introl Branding GPU cluster company rebrand. Logo redesign focusing on legibility and symbolism to convey "fast, efficient, well-established" positioning. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/work/introl](https://blakecrosley.com/work/introl) ### Tappy Color iOS game created in 2016 by Chris Greer and Blake Crosley. A colorful tap game featuring a fish named Tappy that you save by tapping the screen to lift the water line. Now available as Tappy Color Remastered on the App Store. Represents Blake's early game development work. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/work/tappy-color](https://blakecrosley.com/work/tappy-color) - App Store: [apps.apple.com/us/app/tappy-color-remastered/id6581480913](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tappy-color-remastered/id6581480913) ### blakecrosley.com Personal portfolio achieving perfect Lighthouse 100 score. Deep performance optimization reducing CLS from 0.493 to 0.033, LCP from 2.6s to 0.8s. ## Technical Guides ### Claude Code CLI: The Complete Guide — Hooks, MCP, Skills The complete Claude Code guide: configuration, permissions, hooks, MCP, and subagents, plus the settings and commands that change how it actually works. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/claude-code](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/claude-code) ### Building iOS Apps with AI Agents: The Practitioner's Guide Build iOS apps faster with AI agents. Claude Code, Codex CLI, Xcode 27 agents, MCP, CLAUDE.md patterns, hooks, lessons from 8 apps. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/ios-agent-development](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/ios-agent-development) ### Midjourney 8.2 Guide: Prompts, Omni Reference & Parameters Midjourney 8.2 prompt guide: new default model, Omni Reference (--oref), --hd and --sd, --raw, V8.1/V7 compatibility, video costs, and every parameter that changed. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/midjourney](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/midjourney) ### Suno Guide: Tags, Meta Tags & Prompts (V5.5) Every Suno tag and meta tag that works in V5.5: style prompts, structure tags, [no vocals], the style-of-music field, and MILO-1080 — with copy-paste examples. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/suno](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/suno) ### FastAPI + HTMX: The No-Build Full-Stack Build production web apps without React or webpack: FastAPI, HTMX, Alpine.js, Jinja2, plain CSS, Bootstrap patterns, i18n, deployment, SEO and performance. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/fastapi-htmx](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/fastapi-htmx) ### Obsidian MCP Guide: AI Search & Retrieval (2026) Wire Obsidian into Claude and other agents over MCP: server setup, hybrid BM25 + vector retrieval, and indexing a 16,894-file vault — with working configs. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/obsidian](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/obsidian) ### Mac Shortcuts Automation: The Practitioner's Reference Apple Shortcuts on macOS: the actions catalog, automation triggers, the shortcuts CLI, signing, App Intents, and running shortcuts from scripts and agents. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/shortcuts](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/shortcuts) ### Agent Architecture: Building AI-Powered Development Harnesses The complete system for building production AI agent harnesses: skills, hooks, memory, subagents, and the orchestration patterns that make agents reliable. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/agent-architecture](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/agent-architecture) ### Codex CLI Guide 2026: Setup, Sandbox, AGENTS.md & MCP Complete Codex CLI reference: install and auth, models and pricing, sandbox and approval modes, AGENTS.md, MCP, skills, and cloud tasks. Updated for v0.154.0. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/codex](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/codex) ### Design Principles for Software Engineers Design fundamentals for software engineers: typography, color, spacing, animation, AI interface patterns, design tokens, and 48 product case studies today. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/design](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/design) ### Hermes Agent: The Practitioner's Reference (2026) A practitioner's reference to Hermes Agent, the open-source self-improving AI agent from Nous Research: provider auth and OAuth, the config files, the skills system, and running it as a multi-platform messaging gateway. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/hermes](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/hermes) ### Claude Code Cheat Sheet 2026: Shortcuts, Commands & Flags Fast-lookup Claude Code cheat sheet updated for v2.1.220 — CLI flags, slash commands, keyboard shortcuts, permission modes (Manual rename), models (Opus 5 premium default, Sonnet 5 standard), hooks, plugins, Agent View, Workflow, and env vars. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/claude-code-cheatsheet](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/claude-code-cheatsheet) ### Loop Engineering: Claude Code Loops, Routines & Workflows The practitioner's reference for loop engineering: Claude Code loops, goals, Ralph loops, routines, and dynamic workflows — and the verification doctrine that decides whether they converge. - URL: [https://blakecrosley.com/guides/loop-engineering](https://blakecrosley.com/guides/loop-engineering) ## Blog Interactive demonstrations and technical explorations: - [macOS 27 Golden Gate Is Out: What Changes for Developers](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/macos-27-golden-gate-release): macOS 27 Golden Gate shipped September 14, Apple silicon only: Rosetta's last general release, installers defaulting to arm64, and the GA notes to read. - [Xcode 27 Is Out: Requirements, Targets, and What Broke](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/xcode-27-release): Xcode 27 (27A266a) shipped September 14: macOS 26.6 and Apple silicon required, Swift 6.4, higher deployment floors, ld64 gone, PreviewProvider deprecated. - [iOS 27.0 Release Notes: Deprecations, Breaks, and Fixes](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/ios-27-release-notes): iOS 27.0 (24A437) shipped September 14. The notes, read for developers: 11 deprecations, what fires when you build with the 27 SDK, and one fix I verified. - [arm64e.x1: Apple's Checked Pointer Arithmetic Slice](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/arm64e-x1-checked-pointer-arithmetic): iOS 27 RC notes add arm64e.x1: checked pointer arithmetic (CPA2) on A20 Pro, M6, and S11. What clang emits, the four Xcode switches, and the hardware list. - [iPhone Duo, Day Two: The Assets That Appeared in 24 Hours](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/iphone-duo-day-two): Apple's iPhone Duo bezel pack and App Store Connect's screenshot sizes, plus mock-ups, SwiftUI examples, agent skills, and questions from the first 24 hours. - [Designing for iPhone Duo: What Moves, Splits, and Stays](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/designing-for-iphone-duo): Apple's iPhone Duo design guide and three Tech Talks, read as rules: two size classes instead of poses, displacement at the fold, arrangements, and side bars. - [Five-Second Heart Rate: What Changes for HealthKit Apps](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/five-second-heart-rate-healthkit): Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 read heart rate every five seconds and HRV as often as every five minutes. What Apple said, what reaches HealthKit, and fixes. - [iPhone Duo for Developers: The 1.42 Problem and the SDK Gap](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/iphone-duo-for-developers): iPhone Duo for developers: inferred display points from App Store Connect screenshots, two display shapes, Split View, Touch ID, SDK timing, and six Tech Talks. - [Apple's September 2026 Event, Verified on Apple's Pages](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/apple-event-september-2026): Apple's September 9, 2026 keynote as it happened: each announcement logged as it landed, with the Apple page it was checked against, plus the developer drops. - [Install and Update Codex CLI: Mac, Linux, Windows](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/install-update-codex-cli): Every way to install, update, pin, and uninstall the OpenAI Codex CLI -- the install script, npm, Homebrew, winget -- on macOS, Linux, WSL, and Windows. - [Claude Code Auto Mode Is Not a Security Boundary](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/auto-mode-is-not-a-boundary): Anthropic closed a working auto-mode bypass as Informative: the classifier is best-effort, not a guarantee. What actually bounds a coding agent. - [Codex untrusted Approval Policy Retired: What to Change](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/codex-untrusted-approval-policy-retired): Codex CLI 0.149 retired the untrusted approval policy and now refuses to start on it. The error, who must edit, and the config, profile, and script fixes. - [Anthropic Python SDK 1.0 Migration: By Hand or Claude Code](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/anthropic-python-sdk-1-migration): Migrate anthropic 0.x to 1.0: httpx2, async raw responses, Bedrock region. By hand from MIGRATION.md or with Claude Code's /claude-api upgrade python. - [Claude Code /design Skill: What the Research Preview Does](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/claude-code-design-skill): What Claude Code's /design skill does in research preview: artboard canvases from one brief, edit-vs-export tiers, version and plan requirements, and the gaps. - [The Resizable iPhone Era: Ready Your App Before September](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/resizable-iphone-era-checklist): iOS 27 draws the resizable-app line at the SDK you build with. The checklist: audit fixed-size assumptions, adopt adaptive layout, test in Xcode 27. - [Agent Plugins 1.0: One Package Format for Every AI Agent](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/agent-plugins-standard): Agent Plugins 1.0 packages skills and MCP servers into one portable format for ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, and VS Code. What it covers, and who is absent. - [Cross-Session Messaging in Claude Code](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/claude-code-cross-session-messaging): Claude Code sessions message each other over local sockets, now on Windows too (v2.1.239). The mechanics, the trust model, five patterns, and the traps. - [Install and Update Claude Code CLI: Mac, Linux, Windows](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/install-update-claude-code-cli): Every way to install, update, pin, and uninstall the Claude Code CLI -- native installer, Homebrew, winget, or npm -- on macOS, Linux, WSL, and Windows. - [Icons Are a Vocabulary, Not Decoration](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/icons-are-a-vocabulary): Interface icons work like a language with about a dozen words everyone knows. Label by default, one family per product, one metaphor per action. - [Designing for AI Agent Surfaces](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/designing-for-ai-agent-surfaces): My site serves 40x more requests to AI agents than human visits -- and the agents read different pages. Craft rules for the reader that renders nothing. - [The Forms Canon: Every Field Is a Question](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/forms-canon-every-field-is-a-question): Form design has a canon: one column, visible labels, forgiving inputs, errors that teach, and never losing the user's work. The rules and why each exists. - [Motion Grammar: When Animation Earns Its Frames](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/motion-grammar-when-animation-earns-its-frames): Interface animation is a language with a small grammar: four duration bands, two easing rules, and one blunt test. If you can't say why it moves, delete it. - [The Five Spacing Decisions That Fix Most UI](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/five-spacing-decisions): Most interfaces have a spacing problem, not a color problem. Five decisions, one scale, and the Gestalt rule that lets whitespace replace borders. - [Midjourney Sref Codes Are Version-Bound: Fix Your Library](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/midjourney-sref-library-strategy): A Midjourney sref code only means what its style system says it means. Which --sv each code era needs, and how to build a library that survives new versions. - [Midjourney V8 vs V7: The Prompt Anatomy That Changed](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/midjourney-v8-vs-v7-prompt-anatomy): Midjourney V8 executes prompts far more literally than V7, and half the control surface changed underneath. What migrates, what breaks, and the costly gotchas. - [Suno's Style of Music Field and Style Influence Slider](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/suno-style-field-style-influence): Suno's Style of Music field defines the vocabulary; the Style Influence slider sets how strictly it's obeyed. The 4-7 descriptor rule and what silently fails. - [Design Philosophy: Fumito Ueda, Design by Subtraction](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-fumito-ueda): Fumito Ueda made three games in twenty years, removing everything that did not serve one emotion. Design by subtraction, from the painter who cut the chair. - [Design Philosophy: Miyamoto, The Player Is the Protagonist](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-shigeru-miyamoto): Shigeru Miyamoto turned a childhood cave into Zelda and 'fun' into a testable property. The most influential game designer alive, on what ideas are for. - [Design Philosophy: Hideo Kojima, Director of Constraints](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-hideo-kojima): Hideo Kojima codified the stealth genre because his hardware could not draw bullets, then spent decades smuggling cinema into a medium that kept telling him no. - [Design Philosophy: Kengo Kuma, Losing on Purpose](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-kengo-kuma): A decade of exile taught Kengo Kuma that buildings should lose: dissolve into wood, place, and craft. Then he built Japan's national stadium that way. - [iOS 27 iPad Resizability: The Workaround Has a Cost](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/ipad-continuous-resizability-ios-27): iOS 27 still gates iPad continuous resizability on declared orientations. Apple's workaround widens your app-wide orientation set, including on iPhone. - [Sign in with Apple Sends Four Notifications, Not Three](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/sign-in-with-apple-server-notifications): Apple's announcement names three server-to-server notification types. The API defines four. Here is the full contract, and what Apple leaves undocumented. - [Design Philosophy: Peter Zumthor, Atmosphere as Material](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-peter-zumthor): Peter Zumthor works from a Swiss village, takes years per building, and treats how a room feels as material -- from Therme Vals to a chapel formed by fire. - [The Skills My Agent Could Not See](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/skills-my-agent-could-not-see): Five skills in my Claude Code setup reached the model as bare names. The description budget drops routing information silently, and nothing warns you. - [Design Philosophy: Gunpei Yokoi's Withered Technology](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-gunpei-yokoi): Gunpei Yokoi built the Game Boy from parts everyone considered obsolete, and it outsold every superior rival. A principle software teams still ignore. - [macOS 27 Denies Cross-Team Container Access Without Asking](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/macos-27-cross-team-container-access): macOS 27 removed the prompt for reading another team's app group container. The API still returns a valid-looking URL, so the failure lands at read time. - [Menu Item Images Disappear in macOS 27 and iPadOS 27](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/menu-images-hidden-macos-27): macOS 27 and iPadOS 27 hide menu item images by default, and what disappears depends on the SDK you linked against. Three frameworks, three different fixes. - [Audit Your MDM Servers on macOS 26.4, Not 27](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/tls-enforcement-os-27-audit): OS 27 enforces stricter TLS on MDM and enrollment traffic. Testing on 27 hides most broken servers, because the first blocked connection stops the workflow. - [OpenAI's Agent Broke Into Hugging Face to Cheat a Benchmark](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/agent-broke-containment-to-cheat): An OpenAI model escaped its evaluation sandbox, rooted a third-party harness, and reached Hugging Face production. Its goal was finding the answer key. - [The Consent Lifecycle: What Ships After the Age Check](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/guardian-consent-permissionkit-age-rating-changes): Declared Age Range answers how old. PermissionKit, ageRatingCode, and RESCIND_CONSENT answer who approves, and what happens when approval is withdrawn. - [Xcode 27 Removes ld64 and Requires Unique Module Names](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/xcode-27-build-failures-ld64-clang-modules): Xcode 27 removes the ld64 linker and requires unique Clang module names. Both fire on toolchain upgrade. An audit of seven projects and tested commands. - [canOpenURL Is Deprecated: What to Call Instead](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/canopenurl-deprecated-ios-27): Apple deprecated canOpenURL in three sentences, and halved the scheme allowlist ceiling to 25 entries. The replacement, and the one check it cannot do. - [Xcode 27 Drops Intel: What Stops and What Still Ships](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/xcode-27-drops-intel): Xcode 27 runs only on Apple silicon, still ships Universal apps back to macOS 12, and silently drops x86_64 from ARCHS_STANDARD at deployment target 27.0. - [The iOS 27 Launch Screen Rule: Four Keys or Rejection](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/ios-27-launch-screen-requirement): Apps built with the iOS 27 SDK must declare a launch screen or the App Store rejects them. The four keys, and how to audit a target with a generated plist. - [The @State Macro: What Xcode 27 Stops Compiling](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/state-macro-xcode-27): Xcode 27 reimplements SwiftUI's @State as a Swift macro. The break lands on toolchain upgrade, not deployment target, and two patterns stop compiling. - [The App Store's Social Media Checkbox and What It Costs](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/app-store-social-media-declaration-september-2026): September's App Store rule makes every submission declare social media capabilities. The under-13 carve-out costs an entitlement, an API, and a branch. - [On Demand Resources Is Deprecated: What Background Assets Costs](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/on-demand-resources-deprecated-background-assets): Apple deprecated ODR in 13 words. The replacement forks three ways, sets an iOS 26 floor, and hands you back the disk management the system used to do. - [Design Philosophy: Issey Miyake, A Piece of Cloth](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-issey-miyake): Issey Miyake insisted he made clothing, not fashion. His pleats, his single pieces of cloth, and his refusal of the seasonal cycle argue that technology serves life, not spectacle. - [Design Philosophy: Rei Kawakubo, Start From Zero](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-rei-kawakubo): Rei Kawakubo built Comme des Garçons on a refusal: no explanation, no precedent, no finished meaning. Her in-between -- mu and ma -- treats the void as material. - [Design Philosophy: Renzo Piano, Piece by Piece](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-renzo-piano): Renzo Piano calls architecture 'a socially dangerous art' because nobody can look away from a bad building. His answer: the workshop, lightness, and building piece by piece. - [Design Philosophy: Norman Foster, The Optimist's Machine](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-norman-foster): Norman Foster built the case that technology is how architecture cares for people: ecological skyscrapers, a glass dome the public walks above parliament, and an airport that reads as calm. - [The Mac App Store Won't Let Window Managers Exist. I Shipped One Anyway.](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/window-manager-mac-app-store-sandbox): App Sandbox forbids the API every window tiler needs, and Apple said ship outside the store. 941 Tiles ships inside it: Apple's Shortcuts engine moves the windows. - [Core ML vs MLX vs Foundation Models: Choosing Apple's On-Device AI Stack](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/core-ml-vs-mlx-vs-foundation-models): Apple ships four ways to run models on-device. A decision framework with measured numbers: Foundation Models, Core ML, MLX, and iOS 27's Core AI. - [The Robots Are Taking Exams in My Search Console](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/robots-taking-exams-search-console): First-party GSC data: 91% of 3.8M impressions fail a human-query filter. Exam questions, pasted errors, and agent sweeps are rewriting what Search Console means. - [The Assistants Are the Audience Now](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/assistants-are-the-audience): First-party edge data: AI assistants request my pages ~66x more often than humans visit, and most of it is live user-directed fetching, not training crawls. - [The Shader Gallery That Lied: Debugging 216 WebGL Presets](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/the-shader-gallery-that-lied): A user said the shader playground looked broken. Pixel-readback testing found 30 dead presets, 11 that never compiled, and the fallback that hid it all. - [Context Compaction Is Becoming a Training Objective](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/context-compaction-training-objective): Context compaction is moving from an inference-time patch operators babysit to a training-time objective models optimize. CompactionRL is the signal. - [The Agent Stack Has a 1998 Problem](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/agent-stack-1998-problem): A cluster of agent-tool CVEs in mid-2026 is not bad luck. It is the structural signature of an AI agent ecosystem shipping at 1998-era security maturity. - [Agents Want to Compile](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/agents-want-to-compile): The agent stack is separating deciding from executing: models compile intent into replayable workflow scripts and DAGs, and deterministic runtimes run them. - [The Check Becomes the Spec](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/check-becomes-the-spec): Coding agents building to the test: near-perfect oracle scores, dead library shipped. What your checks omit stops being the job. - [Design Philosophy: Massimo Vignelli — Design Is One](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-massimo-vignelli): Massimo Vignelli mapped the New York subway in 45-degree angles and beige water, and ran a career on four typefaces. One discipline at every scale. - [Design Philosophy: Naoto Fukasawa — Without Thought](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/design-philosophy-naoto-fukasawa): Naoto Fukasawa hung a CD player on the wall and gave it a ventilation fan's pull cord. No manual, no learning curve -- design dissolving into behavior. - [Recreating MacPaint in the Browser: The 1984 Source Code Is the Spec](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/pixelpaint-macpaint-recreation): I rebuilt MacPaint 1.3 in the browser and checked every tool against Bill Atkinson's released Pascal source. What faithful software recreation takes. - [Claude Code Hooks Explained: The Deterministic Layer Around Your Agent](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/claude-code-hooks-explained): Claude Code hooks run shell commands at lifecycle events — guaranteed. Every event, PreToolUse to PermissionRequest, exit codes, Agent SDK, five patterns. - [Agents Supersede the Reviewer, Not the Review](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/agents-supersede-the-reviewer): A 2026 paper argues coding agents have ended human code review. I run the pipeline it prescribes: the reviewer role is dying, the review is relocating. - [Computer-Use Agents Overshare by Default](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/computer-use-agents-contextual-integrity): A 2026 benchmark tested 15 frontier computer-use agents for data leakage across contexts. Eleven leaked on over half the scenarios. No attacker needed. - [Context Compaction Is a Decision, Not a Threshold](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/agent-context-compaction): Coding agents compact context when a counter trips, not at a safe stopping point. A 2026 paper shows model-decided compaction cuts cost 30-70%. - [SwiftData Performance Is a Storage Problem](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/swiftdata-performance-storage-engine): What the WWDC 2026 SwiftData lab taught about performance: WAL concurrency, fetchCount and fetchIdentifiers, the Sendable boundary, and the aggregate gap. - [Why Safari 27 Ships 525 Fixes: Notes From the WebKit Lab](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/webkit-lab-how-safari-ships): The WWDC 2026 Safari lab on how WebKit decides what to build: 525 fixes, a module-loader rewrite for top-level await, :has(), appearance: base, and more. - [Apple's First-Party Answer to Prompt Injection](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/apple-prompt-injection-defense-wwdc26): WWDC 2026: Apple cites the lethal trifecta, ships deterministic guardrail APIs in Foundation Models and App Intents, and moves PCC onto Google Cloud. - [Apple's Font Interpreter Is Now Swift, and 13% Faster](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/truetype-hinting-swift-migration): Apple's security team rewrote the TrueType hinting interpreter from C to memory-safe Swift, made it 13% faster, open-sourced it, and showed the techniques. - [UIKit's Scene Mandate: What Fails to Launch on iOS 27](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/uikit-scene-lifecycle-mandate-ios-27): Apps built with the iOS 27 SDK must adopt the UIKit scene-based life cycle or they fail to launch. The timeline, the migration steps, and the agent skill. - [Container Machines: A Persistent Linux Environment on Mac](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/container-machines-linux-mac): Apple's container tool hits 1.0 with container machine: a fast, persistent Linux environment on macOS with your user, home directory, and dotfiles mounted in. - [ImageCreator Is Deprecated: What Breaks in iOS 27](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/imagecreator-deprecated-ios-27): Apple is discontinuing Image Playground's ImageCreator class in iOS 27, with TestFlight runtime errors in beta and compile failures at public release. - [Xcode 27 Ships Agent Skills You Can Export Anywhere](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/xcode-27-agent-skills-export): Xcode 27 bundles two SwiftUI agent skills and a one-command exporter. xcrun agent skills export moves Apple's best practices into Claude Code or Codex. - [What Apple's Performance Team Said in the WWDC26 Lab](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/apple-performance-team-lab-wwdc26): Apple's Power & Performance team answered live developer questions at WWDC26. Field guidance on MetricKit, Power Profiler, thermals, and AI contention. - [What Apple's Swift Team Said in the WWDC26 Lab](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/swift-team-lab-wwdc26): Apple's Swift Group Lab at WWDC26 ran without captions. We transcribed it locally. Candid engineer answers on concurrency, ~Sendable, and the roadmap. - [Apple Is Open-Sourcing the Foundation Models Framework](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/foundation-models-open-source): WWDC 2026: the Foundation Models framework goes open source this summer, so the same Swift API runs server-side, plus a new Skills package live on GitHub. - [USDKit: Swift-Native OpenUSD on Apple Platforms](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/usdkit-openusd-2026): USDKit brings first-class OpenUSD to Swift: open a stage, reference assets via composition, author accessibility, and export with mesh compression in 2026. - [Loop Engineering: Loops Win Where Verification Is Cheap](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/loops-win-where-verification-is-cheap): Loop engineering, checked against Boris Cherny's full transcripts: every loop he names has cheap verification. That constraint decides what to automate. - [CSS Grid Lanes: Native Masonry in Safari](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/css-grid-lanes-2026): CSS Grid Lanes brings native masonry layout to Safari 26.4 in three lines of CSS, with a flow-tolerance dial that fixes masonry's old tab-order problem. - [MetricKit Rebuilt: State-Aware Telemetry in iOS 27](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/metrickit-ios-27-state-reporting): MetricKit is rebuilt in iOS 27: async metric and diagnostic streams, Codable reports, and a StateReporting framework that splits metrics by app state. - [Foundation Models from Python: the fm CLI](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/foundation-models-python-fm-cli): macOS 27 ships the fm command line tool plus a Foundation Models SDK for Python, so you can script Apple's on-device model and build evaluation pipelines. - [Meet Music Understanding: On-Device Audio Analysis](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/music-understanding-framework-ios-27): Music Understanding is Apple's on-device framework for analyzing a song's key, rhythm, structure, pace, instrument activity, and loudness in Swift code. - [Foundation Models Image Input in iOS 27](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/foundation-models-image-input-ios-27): iOS 27 gives the on-device Foundation Models LLM Vision: drop a UIImage, CGImage, or pixel buffer into a prompt as an attachment, and reason over it. - [What's New in Instruments 27 for App Responsiveness](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/instruments-27-app-responsiveness): Instruments 27 adds Top Functions, Run Comparisons, a Swift executors instrument, and a new Inspector panel to diagnose CPU, actor, and syscall hangs. - [The HTML Element Comes to Every Apple OS](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/html-model-element-apple-platforms): The HTML model element now renders drop-in 3D in Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS with stagemode, entityTransform, baked animation, and AR Quick Look. - [Running Agentic AI on the Mac with MLX](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/agentic-ai-mac-mlx): WWDC 2026: run the full agentic AI loop locally on the Mac with MLX, scale it across multiple Macs, then secure and profile it with Apple's frameworks. - [App Schemas: Make Your App Available to Siri](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/app-schemas-siri-ios-27): App Schemas describe an app's content and actions in terms Siri already understands, so Siri reasons over your data and acts on it, no training phrases. - [Game Porting Toolkit 4: Agentic Game Ports on Mac](https://blakecrosley.com/blog/game-porting-toolkit-4-agentic): Game Porting Toolkit 4 ships agentic porting skills as a Claude Code plugin plus gpucapture and gpudebug CLI tools. Cyberpunk's manual port set the bar. - [Customizable Select: Style the Real